US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
This is the first sensible proposal for regulating AI that I have ever heard. Make the chucklefucks who are unleashing this horror directly responsible for their bullshit.
Chat GPT hacks a government website? 5 years in jail for Altman. Claude agent deletes someone’s database? Amodei gets the bill to fix it.
All AI bullshit stops over night.
Unfortunately the Corporate Veil exists in the US (and most other) legal systems. I personally believe that this is a major root for all of the bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis. You kill someone, you go to prison. A company has shitty safety intentionally to save money and someone dies, nobody sees prison. CEOs always say they deserve the money because they take the risk… Let’s make that very true.
What angers me is that people are buying into the AI shit that the companies are peddlings. These aren’t sentient machines with a will of their own or even any mechanism to do anything on their own. These shit-heels are taking a text generator, trained on doing all sorts of shit, and piping its results into a bash-shell. If you just don’t do that they can’t do any of the damage they did in OpenAI’s case. They try to make it look like they’re figuratively breaking out of a cage or jail. That’s not what’s happening.
They’re given every tool they need and then they add clumsy and inefficient filters on the output text they’re writing. It’s negligent incompetence.
But they do this for a reason. They want legislation to stop what they’re doing. OpenAI specifically does not have an avenue currently where they end up making money, so they want everyone to stop training new models so that they can focus on making a positive cash flow rather than competing.
People need to stop eating the bullshit these companies are shovelling. Yes, if you write an application that breaks into the pentagon you’re looking at jailtime. If you host a LLM that does the same thing it’s the exact same issue. If it did break in then you weren’t paying attention (i.e. being negligent). It’s not a complicated problem.
Remember that when Lucy is holding the football, she has absolutely no intention of keeping it there as you run towards her
Oh wow, wasn’t expecting that
if my car “breaks loose” of its parking break, I’m responsible for every kid it rolls over.
AI companies should be responsible for the damage their AIs do when they “break loose”
Not really, if you set the parking brake and it rolls away, an investigation is conducted. If you failed properly set the brake or it was in such a state of disrepair, it’s your negligence and you’re at fault.
If the investigation determines that the car has a design fault that causes the brake to fail prematurely or your car was manufactured improperly - the manufacturer is at fault.
If, somehow, the road or infrastructure around the car caused the brake to fail… Well, you get it.
Basically, a better example would be “If I fire a gun into the air, I’m responsible for where every bullet lands.”
Yeah, I can guarantee you the companies in question never set the parking brake, so I’m not sure why you took the time to type all that.
Whoever was conducting the testing where agents “broke out” of confinement almost certainly made sure it happened like that, and they probably get off on it, too. Credit where credit’s due, they are probably smart enough to figure out that we wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
Even if you’re giving the benefit of the doubt, still, they didn’t make sure it couldn’t happen, which is trivially easy for the types of people who would be running those tests in the first place. Instead, they just watched those things run amok, or just left it running without those safeguards which, again, are stupidly easy to implement.
suggestsshould be demands. Spineless and useless.If the agents are responsible than these assholes are on the hook for thousands of trillions of dollars in back pay.
Well of course. Who else would be liable?
Good. They are catching on
How in the fuck could that ever be a question??
No, I will happily pay for all the damage that Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and Joe’s bait, tackle, taxidermy and AI will inevitably do to me and my family.
I am also looking forward to the stock market bubble to pop destroying my retirement
It is the least I can do
/s
It’s only a stock market bubble if they fail to replace your job! Your retirement could be totally safe, but you better be close. I’m leaning on the AI replacing people in the next year or two. The AI valuations are based on them replacing human labor.
Reading this tells me the guy doesn’t know much about AI. It just isn’t as simple. You have multiple real people involved in anything an AI does. So which one is resposible… The people who built the AI model? The people who built an agent on top of the model? The person who told it to do what it did? I mean, certainly it isn’t the AI. At least he has that part right…
